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igenlodeAfter spending a good deal of time chasing dates of French foreign policy, plus the career of the "real d'Artagnan" in the hopes that that might help, I came to the unhappy conclusion that since the royal Musketeers were basically not involved in any military campaigns between the siege of La Rochelle (as featured in Dumas) and their abolition by Marazin (not featured in Dumas), d'Artagnan had probably been stuck in Paris mounting ceremonial guard on the palace for the last twenty years, whereas I'd pictured him as a serving veteran of the Thirty Years' War. However, re-reading the relevant opening chapters of "Twenty Years After", in which, as I had recalled, he is very definitely described (D'Artagnan at the age of forty) as "an old trooper", forever in garrison or in camp, and consequently lacking in social graces, I rediscovered with a jolt the episode in which he is very explicitly mentioned as going off to war, and moreover as being wounded and left on the field of battle during l’expédition de Franche-Comté. Which suits my purposes admirably, however unhistorical it might be, and however much of a brief aside in the episode of the Swiss rival who meanwhile replaces the presumed-dead d'Artagnan, events which figure far more largely in the chapter ;-)
(I note also yet another inconsistency at the start of this chapter, where it is said that Athos le quitta le premier, pour se retirer dans cette petite terre dont il avait hérité du côté de Blois ; Porthos, le second, pour épouser sa procureuse ; enfin, Aramis, le troisième, pour entrer définitivement dans les ordres et se faire abbé -- an order of events which appears to contradict the version given in the epilogue to "The Three Musketeers", where first Porthos resigns to get married, then Aramis disappears and turns out later to have taken Holy Orders, and Athos remains as a musketeer under d'Artagnan's command for another five years :-p)
And while I knew that the online English translation of "Twenty Years After" that I had happened to download had been considerably abridged, I received a considerable shock on discovering that not only had my own physical copy of "The Man in the Iron Mask" (which I had been browsing through along with the other sequels in order to pick up a few extra details about the chateau at Bragelonne which get mentioned there) been abridged -- as I discovered when trying to locate the little detail about the chapel and services for the tenants on his estate that Athos set up, and which I happened to have remembered from randomly reading the final chapters in an online French version, but which does not occur at all in the funeral scene in my English copy (printed by Dean & Son, probably post-war economy edition) -- but that there is an *entire extra chapter* in the original text which the translator left out! Porthos's Will
What I was actually trying to do was to ascertain whether it was possible for me to have Venya being asked to play at Mass, in a nod to Nat being asked to play his violin to accompany the Sunday hymns at Plumfield. This turned out to be very much harder to ascertain one way or another than I had hoped; all the online material I could find tended to go on about The Counter-Reformation and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes without giving any useful information as to the domestic religious observances of country seigneurs in the mid-seventeeth century! But from what is said about the chapel on Athos' estate (apparently built out of the repurposed stones from his childhood home -- so he did, at some point, resume contact, as we can also gather from the mentions of ancestral furniture at Bragelonne) it doesn't seem that the inhabitants of the chateau attended services there, even though the comte had selected it as his burial place.
Elle était desservie chaque dimanche par le curé du bourg voisin, à qui Athos faisait une rente de deux cents livres à cet effet et tous les vassaux de son domaine, au nombre d’environ quarante, les laboureurs et les fermiers avec leurs familles y venaient entendre la messe, sans avoir besoin de se rendre à la ville -- apparently this chapel didn't have a resident priest. And nor is there any mention of one at the chateau during the entire prolonged period of Athos' final illness, although he gives the doctor the positive assurance that he is too observant a Christian to contemplate the suicide which the former accuses him of attempting by his conduct.
While an English country church of this period would have been likely to enjoy the services of an ad-hoc band of local instrumentalists to accompany the congregational hymns (the image which I suspect I had in mind where Venya was concerned), rather than the organ or at least harmonium which would later become the norm, so far as I have been able to ascertain this just doesn't seem to have been the case in Catholic France, despite all the Masses composed for grand one-off occasions. The closest I was able to come in canon was the mention of choir-boys assisting at the service at Notre-Dame where d'Artagnan goes in the hopes of locating Bazin (and thus tracking down the current address of Aramis) -- and since we are told this this service was a "messe basse" (i.e. spoken and not sung) and hence of short duration, I'm not quite sure what the choir-boys were doing there! Handing things and following in procession, presumably...
At any rate, I'm afraid I came to the conclusion that it seemed overall in the highest degree unlikely that homespun musical services would be going on anywhere at Bragelonne in the same spirit as those hosted by the Bhaers at Plumfield, whatever kind of religious observance did exist there (and there must surely have been *something* as part of the settled routine of life at that era?) If any singing went on, it seems more likely to have been by the celebrant[s] and unaccompanied -- and a country priest would probably simply read his daily offices, with or without a congregation to participate.
(I note also yet another inconsistency at the start of this chapter, where it is said that Athos le quitta le premier, pour se retirer dans cette petite terre dont il avait hérité du côté de Blois ; Porthos, le second, pour épouser sa procureuse ; enfin, Aramis, le troisième, pour entrer définitivement dans les ordres et se faire abbé -- an order of events which appears to contradict the version given in the epilogue to "The Three Musketeers", where first Porthos resigns to get married, then Aramis disappears and turns out later to have taken Holy Orders, and Athos remains as a musketeer under d'Artagnan's command for another five years :-p)
And while I knew that the online English translation of "Twenty Years After" that I had happened to download had been considerably abridged, I received a considerable shock on discovering that not only had my own physical copy of "The Man in the Iron Mask" (which I had been browsing through along with the other sequels in order to pick up a few extra details about the chateau at Bragelonne which get mentioned there) been abridged -- as I discovered when trying to locate the little detail about the chapel and services for the tenants on his estate that Athos set up, and which I happened to have remembered from randomly reading the final chapters in an online French version, but which does not occur at all in the funeral scene in my English copy (printed by Dean & Son, probably post-war economy edition) -- but that there is an *entire extra chapter* in the original text which the translator left out! Porthos's Will
What I was actually trying to do was to ascertain whether it was possible for me to have Venya being asked to play at Mass, in a nod to Nat being asked to play his violin to accompany the Sunday hymns at Plumfield. This turned out to be very much harder to ascertain one way or another than I had hoped; all the online material I could find tended to go on about The Counter-Reformation and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes without giving any useful information as to the domestic religious observances of country seigneurs in the mid-seventeeth century! But from what is said about the chapel on Athos' estate (apparently built out of the repurposed stones from his childhood home -- so he did, at some point, resume contact, as we can also gather from the mentions of ancestral furniture at Bragelonne) it doesn't seem that the inhabitants of the chateau attended services there, even though the comte had selected it as his burial place.
Elle était desservie chaque dimanche par le curé du bourg voisin, à qui Athos faisait une rente de deux cents livres à cet effet et tous les vassaux de son domaine, au nombre d’environ quarante, les laboureurs et les fermiers avec leurs familles y venaient entendre la messe, sans avoir besoin de se rendre à la ville -- apparently this chapel didn't have a resident priest. And nor is there any mention of one at the chateau during the entire prolonged period of Athos' final illness, although he gives the doctor the positive assurance that he is too observant a Christian to contemplate the suicide which the former accuses him of attempting by his conduct.
While an English country church of this period would have been likely to enjoy the services of an ad-hoc band of local instrumentalists to accompany the congregational hymns (the image which I suspect I had in mind where Venya was concerned), rather than the organ or at least harmonium which would later become the norm, so far as I have been able to ascertain this just doesn't seem to have been the case in Catholic France, despite all the Masses composed for grand one-off occasions. The closest I was able to come in canon was the mention of choir-boys assisting at the service at Notre-Dame where d'Artagnan goes in the hopes of locating Bazin (and thus tracking down the current address of Aramis) -- and since we are told this this service was a "messe basse" (i.e. spoken and not sung) and hence of short duration, I'm not quite sure what the choir-boys were doing there! Handing things and following in procession, presumably...
At any rate, I'm afraid I came to the conclusion that it seemed overall in the highest degree unlikely that homespun musical services would be going on anywhere at Bragelonne in the same spirit as those hosted by the Bhaers at Plumfield, whatever kind of religious observance did exist there (and there must surely have been *something* as part of the settled routine of life at that era?) If any singing went on, it seems more likely to have been by the celebrant[s] and unaccompanied -- and a country priest would probably simply read his daily offices, with or without a congregation to participate.